4/14/2009 @ 6:00AM

Why Business Needs To Get Social

Language, humanity’s primary enabling technology, evolves out of the crucible of collective agreement. The words that society chooses to use as signifiers of new concepts are not capricious. They have the power to reveal. There is a reason that the word “social” is being applied as a prefix everywhere–from social media, social computing and the social Web to social capital and the social enterprise. This planetary skin of networked communication that links us together is also reshaping the way business is conducted.

Why are we seeing the rise of all things “social”? Why are people so taken with poking one another, summarizing their experiences in 140 characters or becoming fans of
Coca Cola
? (Don’t laugh–Coca Cola has 3.5 million fans on Facebook). The answer follows the old punch line to a crude joke–”Because it can.” Why is our society massively adopting social technologies? Because we can.

Human beings are innately social. We are designed to share and connect with others. Period. What’s more, we are born into cultures that provide a blueprint for how to communicate and organize. We know how to join a conversation at a party, meet new people and make decisions and organize in a social setting (with varying degrees of competence).

Because we can, our innate desire and capacity to socialize is migrating to a platform (the Internet) that has breathtaking scale. The observation that these activities are meaningless, time-wasting or trivial misses the point entirely. Much of our day is dedicated to these activities already (tipping your hat to the neighbor, sharing a small experience with a coworker, sharing pictures of your kids with the receptionist). If you are wondering why people spend their time poking their friends on Facebook–stop. You are just seeing previously confined social activity being exposed to a larger audience.

Trivializing so called “trivial” activities misses a deeper point: When these tools reach a tipping point, they reveal a utility never anticipated by their creators. Twitter is a case in point. Because we can, 6 million users (and growing rapidly) are sharing bite-size pieces (140 character limit) of their lives with friends and strangers. These messages, or “tweets,” may be largely trivial, yet Twitter is becoming a critical part of the social nervous system. (See “The Rise Of The Social Nervous System.”)

“What are you doing?” is Twitter’s default question, and normally, the answer is trivial. But when the context becomes an emergency–the dozens or hundreds of answers to that question arriving in real time become important news.

There is another implication for businesses in the term “social”: a recognition that we are moving increasingly toward a new model of engagement for businesses, that is, (you guessed it!) social. We have many years of refining a model of management that centers on routinization of work and highly constrained communications flow. We have extracted as much productivity as we are likely to get from these command-and-control techniques, and we have squelched enough employee value in the process.

If the last 100 years was about gaining efficiency and innovation through scale and tight control of resources and communications, the next 100 will be about finding more fluid, open models of collaboration and cooperation. Playing on this new field has different rules. It requires shifting our concept of business from a

legalistic model to a social one. Social contracts are very different from the business contracts that dominated the 20th century corporate mentality. In the business contract, the organizing metaphor is the binding, legal document, and the motivator that constrains bad behavior is the lawsuit.

By contrast, the organizing metaphor for the social Web is relationship, and the building blocks are trust, reciprocity and authenticity. The motivating force that constrains bad behavior is social pressure and cultural norms. This is not to say that we will see the disappearance of legal contracts–they remain necessary. But in a social world, your reputation is everything. Your word is your bond, and sometimes admitting a mistake or saying you’re sorry is the best method of keeping both.

Businesses that ignore the call to be “social”–that is, to abide by a social contract with their constituents (customers, partners, resellers, employees)–run the risk of appearing pathological. I see “social” business as an inherently healthy change. Social contracts generally involve listening and talking, give and take, and trust–built over time through honest engagement. In my experience leading O’Reilly Innovation Labs, the greatest difficulty companies have in making this shift lies in realizing that the change to a social model is transformational. It is about leadership, culture and organizing structure, and very little about technology. And why will society demand that businesses adhere to a social contract? Because now we can.

As vice president with O’Reilly Radar, Joshua-Michéle Ross runs O’Reilly Media’s consulting practice, helping clients apply Web 2.0 principles. He is also working on a video series, “The Future at Work.” E-mail him at joshua.ross@oreilly.com. Follow him on Twitter: @jmichele.